poetry
-

Poems by Shira Erlichman
First Week in Her Bed 1The miracle was that no one was home. I could let the sounds out. The sounds entered through her neck & came out of my mouth. My thighs adagioed. I went 2everywhere she took me. The silence…
-

Rumpus Original Poetry: Megan Pinto
The Doe Because of the rain, the meadowis empty. How quickly the trainvanishes this view. I press my ear to blank paper, hopingto hear you, waiting for a break in the rain. My mother counseled me to pray MaryMother of…
-

The Poem as an Archive of Your Life and the World Around You: The Rumpus Interview with Clint Smith
. . . intellectual rigor or artistic integrity don’t have to come at the expense of legibility . . .
-

Broadening the Scope of the Environmental Canon: An Interview with Camille T. Dungy
Some books defy categories. Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (Simon & Schuster, 2023) by poet Camille T. Dungy pushes the limits of what readers might expect from any genre. Is it memoir or environmental literature?The book covers…
-

I Freed Myself from Needing to Make Sense: A Conversation with Leila Chatti
I’ve learned by now my mind is smarter than I am, than my conscious self—it’s doing all sorts of things in there, unbeknownst to me. I often tell my students that the poem knows better than I do, and so…
-

The Spiritual Fact of Our Oneness: A Conversation with Charif Shanahan
“The world is literally and figuratively on fire. Of all the things we could do with our lives, why write poems?”
-

Poets make the world huge: A conversation with Michael Wiegers of Copper Canyon
I don’t believe we come to nor travel through poetry alone . . . Rather than “social” I would instead encourage the word “communal”; the former sounds a little more performative and exclusive to my ear than does the latter,…
-

The Freedom of Form & Re-Entering Myths: An interview with A.E. Stallings
Our lives may seem to be lived on the small scale of the everyday but, because we are mortal, because ultimately everything is at stake, also play out against something universal and important.
-

Yearning and Wandering: Tiff Dressen’s Of Mineral
The earth is fertile ground for seeking one’s roots and connection to others.
-

The Person Is Not The Body: An Interview with Rushi Vyas
I think, as writers, we only have so much choice. Obsessions emerge from our lived experience.
-

From the Archives: Rumpus Original Poetry: Three Poems by Luther Hughes
About storms, truly, what did I know?
